This research project investigates the influence of tourism, place marketing and entrepreneurial forms of urban governance on the formation of urban ethnic discourses. The working argument is threefold:
(1) that place-marketing and tourism create a new discursive field in which narratives of ethnicity expressed through the built environment are rewritten:
(2) that various agencies with differing agendas pursue diverse strategies in marketing heritage and ethnicity; and
(3), that disenfranchised communities are often silenced by official neoliberal discourses while simultaneously being given a place to speak through the development of their own tourist attractions and place-marketing schemes.
The drives to generate service-sector growth and to attract investors and businesses through strategic marketing are perhaps the most aggressive forces shaping cities today. These goals have powerful impacts on spatial planning, new construction, urban policy, and resource allocation.1) Such urban regeneration schemes are particularly attractive to transitioning cities, such as post-socialist cities or newly deindustrialized cities, looking to develop new methods of income generation. Moreover, given the low overhead costs and the ease with which small suppliers can infiltrate the market, tourism is a sector which socially and economically disadvantaged people can enter with relative ease.2) Thus, both the government (often through public-private partnerships), and community groups in transitioning cities often seek to develop a strong tourism industry in order to generate revenue and build infrastructure.3)
During such regeneration processes, discourses and narratives relating to the cities' heritage and demographics are rewritten. On both a macro and a micro scale, ethnic identity is expressed in cities through an array of spatial, social, and symbolic forms: businesses, cultural and community centers, districts, neighborhoods, language, dress, graffiti, flags and other symbolic markers, etc. Individual and collective identities both are defined, expressed, and legitimized through spatial and material practices.4) In turn, these expressions shape cultural and ethnic identity formation. All cultural expressions from extravagant monuments to daily dress are essential to the formation and preservation of collective memory—and therefore, to creation of a common heritage, itself one of the defining markers of an ethnic group.5)
Tourism and place-marketing provide a new discursive lens for the rewriting of ethnic discourses and the reformation of ethnic images in the city. Tourism and place-marking are essentially discourse-producing mechanisms aimed at audiences interested in the cultural and historical narrative of a particular place. Place-marketing actively rewrites and redevelops the built environment of the city and its narratives by
(1) selecting particular structures and narratives over others for promotion
(2) reframing those structures in order to make them more tourism-friendly and “readable”
(3) changing structures and districts into tourist attractions and thus reassigning ownership of the city and
(4) spurring urban development schemes. And like all discourses, those produced for the sake of tourist consumption are subject to any number of falsifications or manipulations to suit a particular purpose.
Analyses of how a city chooses to present itself, which narratives it chooses to present, which it chooses to ignore, which social groups are included and excluded, can provide valuable insight into a particular group's acceptation, legitimacy and integration, within the city.6) Governments and urban management regimes worldwide create new formations of ethnic, cultural, and national identity through the development of tourist attractions, tourist narratives, and place-marketing schemes. Tourism can both bind ethnic groups to the nation as well as provide them the tools with which to declare and maintain their separateness.7) Under Rabin, new government sponsored tourism patterns and trails in Israel engendered new imaginings of nationhood which, for the first time in decades, conceived of Palestinians living within the 1949 Armistice line as Israelis.8) Tourist interest in socially marginalized groups, such as the Sherpa in Nepal, can successfully increase that group´s social standing within a state and can lead to not only a greater share of representation, but also an increase in government resources, be they financial or infrastructural. On the other hand, ethnic groups considered adverse to a country´s self-image, such as the Turks in Germany, will remain purposely excluded from the country/city’s touristic landscape. Individual and community-group based tourism ventures have been used in the urban centers of Northern Ireland and Bosnia-Herzegovina to contest the legitimacy of the dominant historical or cultural narratives. Other times, cities will boast cosmopolitanism, whether extant or imagined, to make themselves more appealing to tourists and investors. A variety of strategies clearly exist; what is most evident, is that cultural and heritage based-tourism is an important factor in the symbolic reformations of collective ethnicities and the relations which structure intergroup relations.
Ostrava and Krakow are both cities still undergoing the long process of transitioning from Socialism and deindustrialization, and which have actively pursued cultural and heritage based regeneration to attract tourists and investors. Krakow was the European capital of Culture in 2000 and Ostrava is currently a candidate for 2015. Both cities have boast rich multicultural heritages. Yet, while both EU and non-EU based immigration are changing the dynamics of these cities, they do however remain relatively homogeneous. In Ostrava, discussions of ethnicity are linked primarily to national minorities, who are represented in the city's symbolic landscape through an array of cultural centers (German House, Polish House, etc.). In Krakow, urban managers are actively producing a discourse of the city as a diverse, open, and cosmopolitan locale, in efforts mostly to appeal to the vast numbers of tourists the city sees every year, rather than to actually reflect the reality of citizens actually in residency. Histories of ethnicity and ethnic relations in both cities must be historically situated, as the cities' Jewish heritages and histories of forced migrations inevitably shape contemporary understandings and formations of ethnicity. In Krakow especially, we see a continually growing interest in Jewish heritage and Jewish history, which has developed almost entirely in response to tourist interest. The Jewish district of Kazimierz is heavily marketed in city promotional materials and the city has developed a specific Jewish heritage trail. Kazimierz boasts kosher restaurants, Jewish bookstores and hosts a yearly Jewish cultural festival. The entire character of the neighborhood has changed within the past 15 years to become essentially, more Jewish; all the while only about 100 self-identified Jews live in the city. The largest minority group in both cities, the Roma, is essentially invisible in the cities' symbolic landscapes.
A discursive analysis of representations and presentations of ethnicity in these cities combined with political and sociological research into how immigration and formations of ethnic identity are perceived and constructed, can tell us much about official discourses on ethnicity in the city and how groups may or may not try to contest these discourses. Tourism, place-marketing, urban regeneration, ethnic discourses and identity formation and ethnic relations are intimately intertwined. And the city—in its spatial, social, and symbolic sense—is at the center of this dynamic interplay.
Notes:
1) See for instance: David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Social Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989); Denis Judd and Susan Fainstein, eds. The Tourist City (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999); and, Sharon Zukin, The Culture of Cities (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995).
2) Susan Fainstein and David Gladstone, “Evaluating Urban Tourism” in The Tourist City, eds., Dennis Judd and Susan Fainstein (New Haven: London: Yale University Press, 1999), 24.
3) David Gladstone, From Pilgrimage to Package Tour: Travel and Tourism in the Third World (New York: Routledge, 2005); David Harrison, ed., Tourism and the Less Developed World: Issues and Case Studies (New York, NY: CABI Pub, 2001).
4) Morrisey, Mike and Frank Gaffikin. “Planning for Peace in Contested Space,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research vol. 30 no. 4 (December 2006) 873 – 893.
5) Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berekely: University of California Press, 1985).
6) Marc Howard Ross, eds. Culture and Belonging in Divided Societies: Contestations and Symbolic Landscapes (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
7) Michel Picard and Robert E. Wood, eds. Tourism, Ethnicity and the State in Asian and Pacific Societies (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997).
8) Rebecca Luna Stein, Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
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